1. At a nation and regional scale HEA can be used to provide the information required by governments and other agencies to manage the impact of year to year shocks and change on household poverty and food access to allow action to avoid the erosion of assets and a loss of resilience. HEA is currently used for this purpose, and is likely to be of increasing importance as rainfall becomes more variable, extreme events more frequent and the price of food and other goods increase and become less predictable.
2. To develop scenarios to estimate longer term climate impacts. As with other approaches, long term prediction requires projections of population, livestock, prices and other factors and assumes that patterns of livelihood will remain reasonably stable. Scenarios base on HEA data have been developed to estimate the impact of projected climate change in Botswana and Mozambique and in Western Zambia. Projections for shorter periods, for which fewer assumptions are required can provide operationally useful insights into the impact of expected climate and other impacts and the potential impact of proposed agricultural, price and welfare interventions.